Seeing certain plants in the wild for the first time sticks with me. I learned plants from my jobs working in garden centers in high school and college (does anyone remember Frank’s Nursery and Crafts? This is, incidentally, the first place I ever got high – they had me, freshman college student, glueing PVC pipe together for a greenhouse irrigation system inside the greenhouse for hours, you know that purple primer and the glue, after my shift I had to sit in my car for a while breathing in clean air before I felt like I could drive – that’s what all the fuss is about – getting high? I was not impressed or interested in feeling like that again …anyway back to plants!)

Just as I remember very clearly that glue incident, I remember distinctly where I saw some of my first familiar plants in the wild. My nascent plant education was not through finding plants in the wild and learning what they are, but through working in retail garden centers, answering customers’ questions and unloading, organizing, staging, arranging, watering and maintaining plants in nursery yards. Then I learned my plants in college using our botanical garden campus as a classroom. My early plants were containerized and immature or in an artificial garden setting. Sure I knew some plants from my pine barrens childhood – oaks, pines, blueberries, black walnut, sassafras, sweet fern and bracken fern but the plants I learned as I started my education and career were mostly, in my mind, commodity sized and situated.

As I started exploring more and more, and botanizing became a hobby obsession, I began encountering those plants I used to load into the trunks of Subarus and the beds of pick-up trucks as mature specimens in the wild.

This was magical to me and so educational. Here I could see where they really want to grow, versus where I may or may not have told a customer where they would like to grow. I could see their neighbors, who they want to grow with, what types of plants thrive in similar conditions of soil type, soil moisture, sunlight and exposure.

I distinctly remember the excitement of finding my first, and only to date, wild Oakleaf Hydrangea in a Mississippi forest. My first Sweetspire growing along a tea-colored creek in my beloved Pine Barrens. My first wild Alumroot dripping off a soggy wall in a Pennsylvania preserve. These memories are indelible. (If I meet you and we have met before and it seems I cannot remember your name, please note what my limited memory storage space is filled with) Prior to these encounters, I had only known these plants as inventory.

This trip on the Susquehanna added another memory to the list.

Continue reading Botany by Boat: North Branch Susquehanna River →